American exceptionalism goes over Putin's head

Last summer, Americans applauded when an English teacher told members of the Wellesley High School graduating class to get over themselves.

"You are not special," David McCullough said, more than once, in a much-lauded commencement address that went viral.

People of a Certain Age — meaning people old and bitter enough to begrudge teenagers their youth — ate it up with their dentures. Take that, you entitled twits. You're not all that.

For a long time, however, America has rightly been considered all that. So when the leader of Russia writes an op-ed piece in The New York Times and claims that Americans are not special, we tend to bristle. Especially when you consider the messenger.

In his preening piece, Vladimir Putin slammed the United States as a world bully, blamed the rebels rather than the Syrian regime for the use of chemical weapons, and criticized President Obama's speech to the nation.

"And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States' policy is 'what makes America different. It's what makes us exceptional.' It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation," Putin wrote.

Putin is clearly relishing his new role as world peacemaker, which is pretty rich, considering that he's the former head of the KGB and has long enabled the violence in Syria. Meanwhile, his newly converted allies — both the clueless peaceniks and the typical partisans on Fox News who hate Obama so much that they're willing to embrace Putin — are only encouraging the dubious narrative that he's saving the day while our president flounders.

I think Putin should have at it. If he wants to aid efforts in Syria and take the credit, let him. The only ones who really care about credit are the Washington gas bags who assign more weight to political process and gamesmanship than to progress.

As for American exceptionalism, Vlad, you don't get it because you don't share one of our big challenges. It's called immigration, and we fight over it a lot, because so many people from all over the world want to come here. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 138 million people want to move to the United States, triple the number of the next most desired destination, the United Kingdom.

Your country? Not so much. Even more than the cold temperatures, perhaps people were chilled when members of a female punk rock group were imprisoned for performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow cathedral. In America, we have entire news channels devoted to anti-Obama debasement and no one goes to jail. In America, gays and lesbians don't live in fear. In America, our president learns that 1,400 citizens are killed by poison gas, and he wants to do something. He believes a world leader has an obligation to act in the face of atrocities.

As children, we were taught that America was the greatest nation on earth. As we grew older, we learned that our nation isn't perfect and that our free-wheeling democracy can sometimes make a mess of things. We clash about ideas and make mistakes. If our president seems indecisive about Syria, for example, it's not because he's weak. It's because he's willing to listen.

But if the worst you can say is that he hadn't considered all the political angles in his rush to use the mighty power of the United States to protect innocent civilians, I can live with that. No one wants more military conflict. But in America, thankfully, we're free to tell our leader to pound sand.

That's just one of the things that makes us exceptional. That, and reduced-fat peanut butter.